Arks of the Apocalypse: All around the world, scientists are building repositories of everything from seeds to corals to mammal milk

(The New York Times) — It was a freakishly warm evening last October when a maintenance worker first discovered the water — torrents of it, rushing into the entrance tunnel of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a storage facility dug some 400 feet into the side of a mountain on a Norwegian island near the North Pole. A storm was dumping rain at a time of year when the temperature was usually well below freezing; because the water had short-circuited the electrical system, the electric pumps on site were useless. This subterranean safe house holds more than 5,000 species of essential food crops, including hundreds of thousands of varieties of wheat and rice. It was supposed to be an impenetrable, modern-day Noah’s ark for plants, a life raft against climate change and catastrophe. Local firefighters helped pump out the tunnel until the temperature dropped and the water froze. Townspeople from the village at the mountain’s base then brought their own shovels and axes and broke apart the ice sheet by hand.

A few Norwegian radio stations and newspapers reported the incident at the time, but it received little international attention until May, when it was becoming clear that President Trump was likely to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. Suddenly the tidings from Svalbard were everywhere, in multiple languages, with headlines like “World’s ‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault Has Been Breached by Climate Change.” It didn’t matter that the flood happened seven months earlier, or that the seeds remained safe and dry. We had just lived through the third consecutive year of the highest global temperatures on record and the lowest levels of Arctic ice; vast swaths of permafrost were melting; scientists had recently announced that some 60 percent of primate species were threatened with extinction. All these facts felt like signposts to an increasingly hopeless future for the planet. And now, here was a mini-fable suggesting that our attempts to preserve even mere traces of the bounty around us might fall apart, too.

The seed vault is perhaps the best-known project in a growing global campaign to cache endangered phenomena for safekeeping. Fortunately — the leak snafu notwithstanding — scientists, governments and even private companies have become quite good over the last decade at these efforts to bank nature. The San Diego Zoo’s Frozen Zoo cryogenically preserves living cell cultures, sperm, eggs and embryos for some 1,000 species in liquid nitrogen. Inside the National Ice Core Laboratory, in Lakewood, Colo., a massive freezer contains roughly 62,000 feet’s worth of rods of ice from rapidly melting glaciers and ice sheets in Antarctica, Greenland and North America. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington maintains the world’s largest collection of frozen exotic-animal milk, from mammals large (orcas) and small (critically endangered fruit bats), in order to help researchers figure out how to nourish the most vulnerable members of any species: babies. An international project called Amphibian Ark engages in ex situ conservation by relocating amphibians, the most endangered class of animal, indoors for safekeeping and sperm collection.

It seems to be a human impulse to collect things just as they’re vanishing. During the Renaissance, wealthy merchants and aristocrats exhibited their personal compendiums of mastodon bones, fossils and all manner of dried, pickled and stuffed creatures in what were called cabinets of curiosity. Some anthropologists believe their discipline emerged when Europeans began to experience a sort of nostalgia for the native populations they had wiped out with their diseases and guns. That feeling sent them scurrying off to gather up ethnographies, dying languages and sometimes even living subjects. Zisis Kozlakidis, the president of the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories, an organization that represents some 1,300 biobanks containing specimens like viruses and the reproductive cells of clouded leopards, told me a collecting rush is underway, which he likened to an international space race. “There is,” he said, “a very intense feeling that we’re losing biodiversity quicker than we can understand it.” […]

But the world, as always, is changing — and now we’re fomenting and accelerating that process in ways we don’t fully understand. The banks themselves are vulnerable to that change. All manner of things can go wrong: power outages, faulty backup generators, fires, floods, earthquakes, contamination, liquid-nitrogen shortages, war, theft, neglect. In early April, a freezer failure at a University of Alberta cold-storage facility allowed some 590 feet of ice cores to melt, turning tens of thousands of years of frozen clues about the earth’s climate into puddles that one glaciologist, surveying the sad aftermath, likened to a swimming-pool changing room. The associated data that indicates what’s in these vaults — the genomes, the origin stories — could be hacked, corrupted, lost or just formatted in such a way as to be inscrutable to those who might try to decipher it later. These are the kind of anxieties that Oliver Ryder, a director at the San Diego Zoo’s Global Institute for Conservation Research, turns over in his mind in the middle of the night. “It is not, ‘Is something bad going to happen?’” he told me. “Over time, bad things will happen. They always do.” […]

—

Amphibian Ark, various locations

For the Amphibian Ark, an international collaboration among scientists at more than 180 research facilities in 32 countries, herpetologists breed and maintain what they call “captive insurance colonies” like this one at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo with the aim of saving amphibians from a global die-off so severe that many regard it as an “extinction crisis.” They intend to someday release the specimens back into the wild.

No one has seen a Panamanian golden frog in the wild since 2009; the species is among many being ravaged by the deadly chytrid fungus. The frog at left, at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, was captured 15 years ago and is considered a “founder.” His offspring are helping to rebuild the species in captivity. On the right is a female, her abdomen swollen with eggs.

—

Coral Restoration Foundation, Florida Keys

The Coral Restoration Foundation sustains the world’s largest collection of ocean-nursery-raised corals, which in the wild are increasingly endangered by overfishing, agricultural runoff, warming water temperatures and ocean acidification. Located a few miles off the coast of Key Largo, Fla., more than 400 coral “trees” grow here in the Tavernier Coral Nursery, including five threatened species.

Having pioneered a method for growing coral on treelike structures made from PVC pipes, the foundation grows coral in an underwater nursery for six to nine months before the specimens are taken to the ocean, glued into place and used to repopulate faltering reefs.

Depending on the coral species, researchers might let a specimen grow to the size of a softball or a cantaloupe in the nursery before replanting it. Coral reefs are some of the richest ecosystems on the planet; despite being present on less than 2 percent of the ocean floor, they provide food and shelter to about a quarter of all known marine species. [more]

Comments

Jesus ALREADY RETURNED FOR THE “2ND” AND LAST TIME……..There are no more comings of Jesus and the day of the lord does not last for 24 hours!?!…….Even Islamic theology is waiting for the second coming of Christ but this is also how we know slam dunk that Muhammad was a false teacher…just like most “bible teaching Christians”…….THE SECOND COMING Thou Fool! “I come quickly” so “Hold fast till i come”… NOT …“in another 2000 yrs I might be coming soon any time now, so hold fast”!?! …those that deny the second coming of Christ in that first generation are practicing a damnable heresy in denying the lord that bought them ( 2Peter 2:1-2 ;2Tim 4:8)…….Mat 7:23..”I NEVER KNEW YOU” …..Mat 10:33. But whosoever shall deny me before men……..sound familiar?…. ……. If I said I am coming to your house in this generation when these things happen but no one knows the day or hour what fool would think I might be coming in 2000 years latter!?!? ..2 Tim 4: 4. And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be TURNED UNTO FABLES……. It is a biblical fact according to the bibles own figures that last days are the last 70 years of the number of years between BC596…to AD70 = 666 yrs the period of time outlined once as a MAN and once as a BEAST in Daniel Ch 2 & 7 respectively .as the time the 7 fold (7 seals/trumps vials) curse of the law of Moses was poured out on the physical seed of Israel purified until only a spiritual seed was left…

Gal 1: 8. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.

The book of Revelation offers us an interesting Theological dilemma. It states Rev 22:16. I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. Revelation also states it is “the true sayings” of Jesus and that it is “the testimony of Christ”. If this is not “the gospel of Jesus Christ” then what is it and should we consider it accursed testimony of an angel? If it is not to be considered accursed, then it cannot be some other gospel message then what was already given previously. However, this is the conundrum, for if this is the gospel message, then why do so few understand it? There is a possibility which few consider but is the overall thesis of this apology. The reason people don’t understand revelation is because they never understood what the gospel message was in the first place! In that case, where does that put those who claim it is not essential for salvation? Do you not find it quite curious that the most “Personally” given NT book By Jesus himself, is the least understood and given the least importance for Salvation in Christendom?….There are numerous preachers and bible exegetes but as Paul said “… I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge” . Most who profess the name of Christ are feeding on doctrines of devils and the ignorant.. There are, without question, many “qualified” teachers and scholars with many years of “dedication” and “solid education”. However, teachers, no matter how well lettered or numbered in degrees; if obtained from others; who are just as equally ignorant in such matters, are just “ blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”………………

Revelation the First Gospel of the Kingdom
978-1-4907-0590-3 (ISBN)

Those looking for a physical return of Christ and your physical body to “leave the dirt” resurrected (1Cor 15:36-37) you are carnal mined & or living in prov 26:12

DAY OF THE LORD”/ YEAR OF THE LORD – does NOT last for 24 hours!?!..Also means the day of resurrection & judgment do not last for one hour or one day either! They only begin (NOT END) in a certain hour & on a certain 24 hour day ….”SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS to arise”…..NOT..”come & get (your new resurrected body) it while it is still hot, only 24 hours of solar power left”!?!

The second coming took place already and Christ promised that only HIS PEOPLE would see him ….John 14:19. Yet a little while, and THE WORLD SEETH ME NO MORE;….. [2 Cor 5:16 Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ AFTER THE FLESH, yet NOW HENCEFORTH KNOW WE HIM NO MORE….(here the Context of John 14 is his second coming)…..continued…..but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also. 20. AT THAT DAY .. 21. He that hath my commandments, and KEEPETH THEM, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and WILL MANIFEST MYSELF TO HIM……(again taking note “as he is” or 1Jn 3:2)

22. Judas saith unto him, not Iscariot, Lord, HOW IS IT THAT THOU WILT MANIFEST THYSELF UNTO US AND NOT UNTO THE WORLD? 23. Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, HE WILL KEEP MY WORDS: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.( Rev 3:20) 24. He that loveth me not.. (1Cor 16:22)…. KEEPETH NOT MY SAYINGS: ( REV 9:16-20)

REVELATION 1:7. Behold, HE COMETH WITH CLOUDS; and EVERY EYE SHALL SEE HIM, …. There is a parallel here with ………….Exodus 24:10. And THEY SAW THE GOD OF ISRAEL : and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness. 11. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand: also THEY SAW GOD, and did eat and drink………..But Christ said….. John 1:18. NO MAN HATH SEEN GOD AT ANY TIME; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. A person can see with their understanding and or see with their eyes…. It can see “seen” for certain that everything that Christ described was seen by the folks of that day in His coming but do they perceive that was him? …So what Christ said is true every eye saw him but the world does not see him….. With the eye they and folks still today can see everything Christ described to have taken place, but they do not “keep” ( believe and understand) his words as such they do not see him nor shall they ever.

The saints who have physical died faithful in the flesh (every man in his own order) are changed in the blink of an eye & caught up to sit on that Great white throne ( this congregation of the saints is the body of Christ that folks will answer to at the judgment and these saints will judge all men who cannot see Christ along with the rest of the world……Folks think they are waiting to see Jesus but they will NEVER see Jesus himself they will only see the body of Christ condemn them the saints judge the world (Rev 3:21; 1 Cor 6:2 et al) the saints are the body of Christ…that is the only part of Christ they shall see….only the saints shall see God face to face…..most peoples idea of the second coming & day of the Lord and the judgment is completely wrong